This evening, despite the opposition of a majority of the public and a significant number of Labour MPs, Parliament voted to renew the Trident nuclear missile system, giving a big `fuck you’ to international law and the principle of non-proliferation.
409 MPs supported the government’s proposal; 161 opposed it.
There was a sizeable Labour revolt, but the support of the Conservatives ensured the bill passed. Watching the debate in Parliament today, it was clear that the Liberal Democrats are not against the principle of a British nuclear “deterrent” at all. Rather, they knew the bill would pass whatever they did, and simply wanted to present themselves as a voice of dissent without actually dissenting at all. Hence the absurd Lib Dem position that Britain does need a nuclear deterrent, but that the decision to renew it should be delayed until after 2010. The inconsistency of the Lib Dem argument was highlighted and mocked throughout today’s debate, and rightly so. This, unfortunately, did the case against renewing Trident no good at all. The cowardice of the Lib Dems means that, once again, the majority of the British public were left without representation in the House of Commons.
According to Tony Blair, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) “makes it absolutely clear that Britain has the right to possess nuclear weapons”. In fact, what the NPT does is commit nuclear states to a gradual reduction in nuclear armaments, culminating in complete disarmament. In a December 2005 Matrix Chambers legal opinion, Rabinder Singh QC and Professor Christine Chinkin (LSE) concluded that replacing the Trident missile system would likely constitute a “material breach” of the NPT. In July 1996, the International Court of Justice concluded unanimously that, “[t]here exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control”.” At the NPT Review Conference in 2000, Britain committed to an “unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear-weapon States to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals leading to nuclear disarmament to which all States parties are committed under Article VI.”
The government claims that since it is proposing to reduce Britain’s stockpile of operationally available warheads by 20%, it is complying with the NPT. In reality, as Rebecca Johnson points out, “Britain’s legal obligations are not merely to reduce the arsenal, but to eliminate it.” She continues,
“The withdrawal and ultimate decommissioning during the 1990s of obsolete weapons such as nuclear artillery and nuclear depth and free-fall bombs was, of course, welcome, but the Article VI obligation is not just to reduce the nuclear arsenals, but to eliminate them.
By no legally admissible reasoning would it be consistent with these obligations for Britain to procure new submarines to carry continuously refurbished US ballistic missiles with up to 160 refurbished or possibly new warheads, with the intention of having this renewed nuclear weapon system come into service in 15-20 years time and run for up to 30 years after that.
The White Paper is not promising to reduce its existing Trident system, which would be welcomed as a step towards giving it up altogether. However it is dressed up, the White Paper’s actual proposal is to maintain at least 80 % of Britain’s nuclear weapons for a further 30 plus years, representing an overall increase in capability and longevity.
This is not disarmament, but “nuclear re-armament”, as noted by Kofi Annan. In pursuing the renewal or modernisation of existing arsenals, the outgoing UN Secretary-General warned that the nuclear weapon states “should not imagine that this will be accepted as compatible with the NPT”.”
In fact, the extent of the government’s contempt for democracy and the law is such that the UK continued to research and design new nuclear warheads at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston (which received (.pdf) £1 billion additional funding from 2005-8) even as Tony Blair went through the democratic motions in Parliament. The Ministry of Defence today admitted that the Trident nuclear missiles are being secretly upgraded to increase their accuracy and ability to attack a wider range of targets. Labour MP Joan Ruddock commented,
“This is further evidence of enhancing the warfighting capability of Trident and gives the lie to the claim in the white paper that it is a matter of simple deterrence.”
The attempts by government ministers and Tory MPs to defend the decision to renew Trident have been laughable. Witness, for example, Foreign Minister Margaret Beckett and Defence Secretary Des Browne warning Labour MPs – only 49% of whom support a British “nuclear deterrent” – that they must vote with the government or else,
“The Tories will say that they saved our nuclear deterrent and only they can be trusted to protect the nation. They will remember this and use it at the ballot box.”
We’re talking about an issue upon which the survival of the human species may well depend, and all Margaret Beckett and Des Browne care about is how it will play out at the next election. In February, Des Browne said that Mutually Assured Destruction is not an “outmoded concept”, explaining,
“As far as we’re concerned in this government, we are committed to maintaining a minimum deterrent and one credible to any potential aggressor.”
Of course, if the government truly believes that Britain needs nuclear weapons for security and self-defence, it must also accept that Iran, North Korea and every other country in the world needs them too. In the words of Nobel laureate Sir Joseph Rotblat,
“If some nations – including the most powerful militarily – say that they need nuclear weapons for their security, then such security cannot be denied to other countries which really feel insecure. Proliferation of nuclear weapons is the logical consequence of this nuclear policy.”
Not so, said Conservative MP James Gray in the House of Commons earlier today. After comparing a nuclear Britain to a gun-carrying policeman, he argued that it is entirely consistent to advocate a British nuclear weapon whilst condemning, for instance, an Iranian one. It is clear, he explained, that “we are the good guys and they are not.” When confronted with this level of ignorance, it’s difficult to know how to respond. Has James Gray been walking around with his eyes shut for the last four years? Or the last four decades? When Britain facilitated the Indonesian genocide of 200,000 East Timorese, and supported the brutal Israeli aggression against Lebanon last year, and enforced the genocidal sanctions against Iraq for a decade, killing close to a million people, were we the “good guys”? Moreover, how can anyone liken Britain, a country that committed the “supreme international crime” (as defined at Nuremberg) against Iraq only four years ago, to a “policeman”? Britain is, completely uncontroversially, a major criminal state. It is a repeat offender, guilty of gross war crimes and consistent contempt for the law. To use Gray’s analogy, renewing Trident is equivalent to giving a criminal a tank.
In reality, there is no defensive justification for retaining Trident. According to the government’s 1998 Strategic Defence Review (.pdf),
“there is no military threat to the United Kingdom or Western Europe. Nor do we forsee the re-emergence of such a threat.”
A July 2006 Defence Committee report supported this analysis, concluding,
“The most pressing threat currently facing the UK is that of international terrorism. Witnesses to our inquiry overwhelmingly argued that the strategic nuclear deterrent could serve no useful or practical purpose in countering this kind of threat.”
The Ministry of Defence has itself acknowledged that “there are currently no major conventional military threats to the UK or NATO? it is now clear that we no longer need to retain a capability against the re-emergence of a direct conventional strategic threat”, whilst a NATO assessment concluded that, “large-scale conventional aggression against the alliance will be highly unlikely”.
The government’s response to this is the “insurance policy” argument – that Britain should maintain a nuclear “deterrent” because, although we do not currently face a conventional military threat and although we do not foresee one occurring, we cannot accurately predict what the world will be like in 30-50 years time. Speaking today, Tony Blair argued this exact point:
“I believe it is important that we recognise that, although it is impossible to predict the future, the one thing? that is certain, is the unpredictability of it.”
Of course, no one can ever know for sure what the world will be like decades into the future, and so this is actually an argument for retaining nuclear weapons indefinitely. The “insurance policy” argument is, in any event, complete nonsense, since it assumes that Britain’s nuclear policy operates in an isolated bubble and has no effect on the world around us. As I wrote last year, the “insurance policy” argument,
“assumes that `the future’ will not be affected by the replacement of Trident. In reality, the disarming of the UK would greatly improve Britain’s standing with the majority of the world and, combined with greater efforts at multilateral disarmament (as required by law), would greatly reduce the threat of proliferation and of nuclear war?
The argument that we should retain the nuclear deterrent as an `insurance policy’ imagines a highly unlikely but quite frightening scenario where Britain stands alone against a serious military threat, conventional or nuclear, from another state. But the point is that by replacing Trident we are actively increasing the likelihood of such a situation occurring. Trident, then, is not an `insurance policy’, unless it is an insurance policy that, upon signing, increases the chances of an accident.”
There is simply no way to reconcile the pursuit of global disarmament with the renewal of Trident. At least those who are pro-Trident should be honest about that. So, for example, Conservative MP Olga Maitland argued that a nuclear-free world “will never be the case”, and that therefore Britain should keep its nuclear deterrent. That, at least, is a consistent position, unlike anything put forward by the Labour government, which pretends to care about proliferation whilst at the same time working to increase it. It is interesting that Olga Maitland doesn’t bother to provide any evidence for her claim that global nuclear disarmament is impossible. In fact, the WMD Commission, chaired by former Director General of the IAEA Dr. Hans Blix, reported (.pdf) last year that,
“Weapons of mass destruction cannot be uninvented. But they can be outlawed, as biological and chemical weapons already have been, and their use made unthinkable. Compliance, verification and enforcement rules can, with the requisite will, be effectively applied. And with that will, even the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons is not beyond the world’s reach.”
Of course, stopping nuclear proliferation isn’t going to be easy. It is, however, necessary for our survival. The WMDC report made a total of 60 concrete recommendations to work towards global nuclear disarmament. See Recommendation No. 7, for example:
“The nuclear-weapon states parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty should provide legally binding negative security assurances to nonnuclear- weapon states parties.”
Unsurprisingly, when countries like Britain and the U.S. go around invading whoever they want, taking no notice of international law or the UN, a powerful incentive is provided for countries like Iran to develop their own nuclear “deterrence”. Indeed, the invasion of Iraq was virtually an instruction to Iran that it better get a nuclear weapon, or else face Western attack.
Another recommendation the report made was to make the Middle East a nuclear-weapons free zone. Iran has, of course, been pushing for this for years. Instead of supporting this eminently sensible idea, the West (including Britain) has backed the clandestine Israeli nuclear weapons programme, and has supported Israel in all of its campaigns of terror and aggression against the Palestinians and its neighbours.
Certainly, any serious attempt at nuclear disarmament would have to involve strengthening multilateral institutions and the NPT, as opposed to undermining them. For the UK to renew its nuclear deterrent despite facing no conventional military threat sends a very clear signal to the rest of the world: nuclear weapons are here to stay. As the WMD Commission reported, a primary reason for the stagnation in nuclear disarmament efforts has been “that the nuclear-weapon states no longer seem to take their commitment to nuclear disarmament seriously – even though this was an essential part of the NPT bargain, both at the treaty’s birth in 1968 and when it was extended indefinitely in 1995.”
In other words, the consequence of the government’s decision to renew Trident will be to undermine efforts at disarmament and to encourage proliferation around the world. As Kofi Annan put it (.pdf),
“the more that those states that already have [nuclear weapons] increase their arsenals, or insist that such weapons are essential to their national security, the more other states feel that they too must have them for their security”.
Tonight’s vote for rearmament is just the latest act in the Blair government’s long campaign for proliferation. With the invasions of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Blair helped establish the principle that the use of force in international relations will be unilateral and preventive, and will not be subject to the authority of the United Nations or international law. The lesson of the Iraq invasion in particular was learnt by many countries across the world – if you want to be safe from a Western attack, get a nuclear weapon, quick!
The NPT was a reaction to the Cold War nuclear arms race, and the nuclear holocaust that very nearly resulted from it. The principle was clear: non-nuclear states would agree to refrain from developing nuclear weapons in exchange for help with civilian nuclear technology and, crucially, the gradual disarmament of the nuclear states. The NPT was not designed to protect the nuclear states from any challenge to their dominance. It was not intended as a tool to protect the status quo. Either nuclear weapons states start disarming, or there is no NPT.
A world in which some states have nuclear weapons while others don’t is completely unsustainable, not to mention unjust. We face a choice between nuclear weapons for all or for none, and today Parliament chose the former. In doing so, it placed Britain’s relationship with the U.S. and the British conceit of being a world power above the security and lives of potentially billions of people. If nuclear proliferation is allowed to continue unchecked and if we do not begin to take the steps necessary for global disarmament, nuclear war is an inevitability. In the words of Dr. Hans Blix,
“So long as any State has such weapons – especially nuclear arms – others will want them. So long as any such weapons remain in any State’s arsenal, there is high risk that they will one day be used, by design or accident. Any such use could be catastrophic.”
The 1996 Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons likewise concluded that the “proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used – accidentally or by decision – defies credibility. The only complete defence is the elimination of nuclear weapons and assurance that they will never be produced again.”
There are other arguments against renewing Trident as well, of course. For one thing, the system’s complete dependence (.pdf) on the U.S. results in a Britain totally subservient to U.S. foreign policy. As Labour MP Michael Meacher put it today,
“The US provides this kit to us not because they believe we are necessary for the defence of the West but because it makes us subservient to US foreign policy, as we have already seen over Iraq and Lebanon and as we could still well see over Iran. The question we need to answer tonight is whether Britain is really a safer place if we trigger a spate of nuclear proliferation across the world leading to regional arms races and a world of 40 or more nuclear states.”
The idea that dependence on the U.S. for our nuclear deterrence necessitates support for U.S. foreign policy is neither new nor controversial. A secret 1988 British government assessment, entitled `The Dangers of Becoming an American Satellite`, concluded,
“The UK, in its relatively weak position, is already greatly dependent upon United States support. It would be surprising if the United States did not exact a price for the support, and to some extent it does so?the more we rely upon them, the more we shall be hurt if they withhold it.”
Indeed the United States has exacted a price for our support – subservience. We are paying that price in blood on the battlefields of Iraq. The United States often follows policies that are harmful to British interests (and usually harmful to American interests as well) and, due to our complete dependence on the U.S. for our nuclear deterrent, we are bound to follow those policies, as with Iraq. In replacing Trident tonight, Parliament has, in effect, re-forged our shackles and handed the master back his whip.
Tonight’s vote for Trident was, in effect, a vote for nuclear proliferation across the world. There is not a single pro-Trident argument employed by the government and its supporters that could not equally apply to every other state on the planet. Genocide, aggression, the undermining of international law, the invasion of Iraq, collusion in CIA torture flights, the erosion of civil liberties at home and now nuclear proliferation – Tony Blair, your `legacy’ is complete.
Cross-posted at The Heathlander